A computer network may have a backup and recovery system for purposes of restoring data (data contained in one or multiple files, for example) of the network to a prior state should the data become corrupted, be overwritten, be subject to a viral attack, and so forth. The backup and recovery system may store backup data in a non-volatile secondary storage, which may be formed from one or multiple direct attached hard drives; one multiple virtual or physical tape drives; a storage appliance; a storage area network (SAN); and so forth.
The backup data may represent virtual machine files. In this manner, the virtual machine files may be files representing virtual disks, configurations, logs, states, and so forth for virtual machines of the computer network. A “virtual machine” generally refers to some an arrangement of components (software and/or hardware) for virtualizing or emulating an actual computer, where the virtual machine can include an operating system and software applications. Virtual machines can allow different operating systems to be deployed on the same physical computing platform, such that applications written for different operating systems can be executed in different virtual machines (that contain corresponding operating systems) on the platform. Moreover, the operating system of a virtual machine can be different from the host operating system that may be running on the platform on which the virtual machine is deployed.